Many governmental units in Minnesota have open road construction and closure data, the data is
disparate, difficult to access, have a dissimilar data structure, and is not
consumed by the private sector/open source mapping applications that we all use
for navigation. It is not practical for every road authority to submit
road construction and closure data to every private sector/open source
map app.

By building a central repository or creating a publishing standard,
governmental units can openly expose road
construction and closure data with a common structure.

Creating a one stop web app for governmental and public
users to view road construction and closures
will give everyone easy access to road construction data without borders or
barriers, and streamline interagency coordination and planning efforts.

Building an application that is capable of publishing
collaborative road construction closure data to all major navigation apps
(Google, MapQuest, Waze, Bing, etc...) will create a live connection between
road authorities and data consumers. An alternative would be that the
collaborative road construction and closure data could be accepted and sourced
directly by major navigation apps (see Waze Connected
Citizens Program).

The State of Minnesota has undertaken similar efforts in the
past, this suggestion is different because it rewards governmental agencies and
the public by connecting authoritative open road construction and closure data
with private sector/open source navigation apps.

I'd like to help with this. I'm wondering if disparate sources can be mapped to a common structure using transformational processes, similar to openaddresses.io. But even if not, a repository of sources could be built, with a map that demonstrates a compilation of a few different sources for seeing a future app.

The most interesting is the json api I found behind the 511 map that doesn’t appear to be advertised or documented that has a query syntax supporting query of eventReports, eventDelays, stationReports including spatial filters:

All of the above provided to me via my contact at the state, very experienced with DOT stuff. As it might be obvious. there are many road closure datasets. What
I would consider the primary road closures data and applications (closures on
DOT roads) were stewarded by a unit at RTMC.

In addition to the RTMC closures feed, there were road closures
datasets stewarded by MnDOT State Aid unit, which included only closures caused
by flooding both on DOT and local roads. The reason this was a separate
dataset was because we would track closures on both local and state roads during
emergency events to support SEOC activity and also to support long term
reporting related to State Aid Funds allocation. This use case wasn’t
supported by the RTMC dataset or mission.

In my opinion, the best solution for disseminating closures to
the masses would be for DOT (both RTMC and State Aid) as well as local road
closure sources to become good stewards of google/navtech/etc data
contributions. RTMC already does this so that’s why Google maps, as well
as android and ios navigation systems “know” about closures along MnDOT
routes. At one time the MN511 map looked very similar to Google
traffic when viewing the closure/accident points and even had very similar
descriptions, indicating that the source of the data was MnDOT but now I’m not
so sure. Maybe MNGeo or another similar entity could manage a project to
help facilitate getting local road closure contacts to provide their data to
Google, etc.

That's a great outline of MnDOT's construction and closures data. I agree with your MnDOT contact that there is an opportunity for a major governmental agency to step up and that is the pattern in many states. On the other hand we are in an age where we have the resources to accomplish big things much more organically, a participant cluster of any size would be good, even one county partnered with its cities would be a great start.